I
was born and raised in a Christian family. I rarely missed going to church service on Sunday mornings or a youth meeting or an annual encampment. Having said that, it is in one of those annual camps, God quickened me and through faith, I have accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior. I've seen the joy in my spirit. In that grand moment of conviction, my heart overflowed with joy and with tears in my eyes, I confessed my sins, asked the Lord to forgive me. It was a good day to remember. I am sure you can relate to this feeling. I rejoice now even more of what God did for me. So what happened then? Is this repentance?
Looking back today after 16 years later, I questioned myself was that true repentance or was it just an emotional, guilty confession of my misbehavior and bad things I've managed to do. There are two ways people used to ask a person if he/she was saved. 'Maru Manassu' (మారు మనస్సు) [Repentance] and another one 'Rakshana' (రక్షన) [Salvation]. Believers interchangeably used these words who mean to ask if he or she is born again. We will come to see that they are related, but not the same.
I can't agree more with Tim Challies in saying,
"It seems that the idea of repentance has fallen out of the church in favor today. We love to stress decisions, worship, faith, and growth but seem to leave out one rather critical aspect of the Christian faith. We need not look far to find people who confess Christ, yet continue to live in ways that would call their confession into question. Because our society so hates the idea of repentance, many churches, out of a so-called “seeker-sensitivity,” has stopped speaking about it, choosing instead to teach about sorrow and brokenness."
Repentance is not a tangential concept in the Bible; rather, it is central in conversion and justification
Thus, it is important to recognize what it is, and what it demands.
The word repentance comes from a Greek word metanoia. The prefix meta can mean 'with', 'beside', or 'after'. The root noia is the verb form of the noun that we can find frequently in the Bible as nous. This is simply the Greek word for "mind". So in the Greek language, it came to mean "a significant changing of one's mind." Thus, in the most basic sense, the concept of repentance in the Bible means "to change one's mind."
The changing of one's mind is not just a matter of intellectual judgment, such as changing our approach after trying to solve a problem. Generally speaking, metanoia has to do with the changing of one's mind with respect to one's behavior. It involves godly sorrow from a previous form of behavior. It's a response to the spirit's regenerative work in a person. Repentance is taking full responsibility for the sin. It is turning from the idol we once served to the one true living God.
